As crazy as it may seem, the holiday season is almost here. Right now, advertisers everywhere are getting ready to blast consumers from every angle, including online search campaigns. So, what does this mean for us?

The Skinny: It means that now is the time to optimize our campaigns to make sure that our ads aren’t lost in the impending barrage of our competitor’s campaigns. What has traditionally worked well in the past may not be good enough to compete during the holiday madness as the cost of bids are driven up, which can potentially push an ad’s page position down.

What time of day should I post? How long should my status messages be? Is it okay to ask followers to like something?

These are just a few of the question that every page administrator faces daily. There are a lot of “best practices” floating around out there that helps with these inquiries, however, there isn’t a whole lot of data to back them up … until now.

The people over at Momentus Media analyzed the top 20,000 Facebook pages to find out which posting techniques really work and placed their findings online for the entire world to see. For each analysis, they dissected 10,000 – 250,000 posts to find out exactly what drives interaction, and more importantly, how to replicate it.

A former colleague of mine used to have the following mantra about online video: “If it’s great, it will go viral.”

Every time I heard that statement, I would wince. While the sentiment was honorable enough, the facts just don’t back up such a worldview. There is a ton of great content out there that never gets shared or viewed by anyone. And this isn’t true just for the online world- it’s true in pretty much every form of media.

Some of my favorite (and critically acclaimed) TV shows were canceled in their first season. In fact, some of today’s most popular TV shows came dangerously close to being canceled because no one was watching them.

For example, NBC’s The Office was on its death-bed midway through its first season, and the only reason it didn’t get canceled was because the network’s president at the time was a huge fan of the series and kept it alive.

So, great content is important, but it doesn’t guarantee viral success. So what does guarantee that a video will go viral?